And So The Day Was Saved
Pity the good folk of Plotville, for they have endured much.
Way back in the day their orphanage burned down.
Then someone robbed the temple.
Then there was the time weapons from the future plowed over several prominent structures.
A notable butt-related tavern brawl caused lots of property damage as wells.
Next was the destruction of the municipal water supply. Then the hordes of possessed shoppers. The goblins army. Night hag hauntings. More temple destruction. Monsters terrorizing the local stables. And that only brings us up to June of 2017!
My point is that, for any long-running campaign, the thousand and one dooms that befall any given adventuring location ought to give us pause. Can we really expect our cheerful townsfolk to oblige us with a Truman Show style reset every other day? How do they keep their sanity? Those poor people are traumatized!
That’s why, for today’s discussion, I want you to tell us how you can avoid the problematic issue of townsfolk seeming hunky-dory with all the horrors. Perhaps your local sheriff finally gets fed up and quits? Maybe the villagers want to tax the adventurers who keep leading danger back to the town? Or what about a wall and a nigh watch to keep out the ravening hordes? In other words, if your setting is regularly terrorized, how does the world change to reflect that? Sound off with your own after-battle setting alterations down in the comments!
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In Ravenloft, our Druidesque character did much to patch things up with a Barovian village after a siege by ghouls population by blessing their acres. They were set for years of bountiful harvests, guaranteeing prosperity and the chance to rebuild … so long as Count Strahd didn’t overtax them accordingly.
On Golarion, we became quite popular in Sandpoint by saving the town from agoblin invasion and generally being helpful around town, working to save the innocent and heal the injured.
Basically, I like to just try to be decent to the NPC population, and often it works. Fix your own messes. Give back to the community; train youngsters; when you practice casting wall of stone, go ahead and use it for the town’s defences; bless the acres and wells. And above all, treat people as people, not game mechanics.
Good on ya for kindness. But like… How did Sandpoint change outside of direct influence from the party?
Big armies came charging in and a creepy serial killer started prowling around. This caused considerable ill-feeling in the community.
Tell the truth, I seldom use towns/villages as encounter sets. Probably because I use miniatures and the idea of constantly swapping tiles or uncovering the already drawn village as the party adventures through, just doesn’t come under the heading of “fun” for me. When the party is having city adventures, it’s all theater of the mind and small locales.
Plus, most towns are large enough to gather a sizable force from the surrounding area to take care of most of the things a party would. If they can’t, they usually send for help though the local temples. Also any of my smaller places would probably have shut down and moved elsewhere after constant monster incursions
Now i wanna see pics of your setup. Sounds complex!
Nah. Just a couple large battle mats and miniatures 🙂
How does the surrounding townsfolk handle the repeated disasters that befall them, thanks to the heroes’ proximity? In a word, poorly. The size of the settlement determines how it responds to the chaos. Smaller settlements tend to evacuate after the third or fourth goblin invasion, bigger ones tend to militarize heavily and/or descend into civil war. Meanwhile, the largest city in the setting, known as the City of 10000 Troubles, has an elite NPC adventurers’ guild/FBI who do their best to keep order and frequently oppose the players, bringers of chaos that they are. The city has also started offering pardons to anyone who volunteers to join the monster exterminating guild. Said city has flimsy regulations and a wizards’ college, so there is no shortage of crises.
I love the idea of a “special officers” force. Maybe that’s because I just watched RRR for the first time….
All the villagers are actually cultists of one sort or another, each waiting for their particular brand of apocalypse…
For the greater good…
In one of my campaigns years ago, the village began to be populated with new shops catering to the adventurers’ wants and needs: the bard who always needed to be the prettiest girl in the room conveniently noticed a new shop selling soaps and perfume, this tiny village now sported TWO blacksmiths and a mercantile shop, one store sold (inconspicuously at first) only those unwanted items that the PCs brought home in their Bag of Holding to sell for cash (at a sizeable mark-up).
The players only figured out that the locals had begun profiling them and developing new ways to separate them from their treasure when they had to buy back some useless dingus that turned out to be a macguffin for a later adventure.
[In an unrelated campaign, the PCs were sued by the management of a resort island they’d purged of a sea-devil invasion. Admitting they’d stolen the enchanted waffle iron and returning it would make them the target of criminal charges for looting in the wake of a catastrophe (especially since they’d bald-faced lied about not having it. Pass the syrup.) The quest to find an equivalent item to placate the resort became the impetus for a later adventure.]
Look, enchanted cookware is vitally important.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mithril
solution:
buy and run an Inn that sells booze and pay all the taxes and guild dues to all the various people that demand their cut… become a part of the community.
One of my players ran for town council. She won. The fact that the rest of the party were playing merry havoc in the Plane of Law such that a recount had to be done three times may have had something to do with it.
I’m reminded of a story from one of the games I’m in.
I’m still kind of new in this game, and after the second encounter, we returned to town and our party is ambushed by a small child looking for her parents. Small complication: the party I had just joined also happens to be the reason said parents are dead. Whoops, great first impression.
Oof. Right in the gut!
This gradual degradation is actually the game-plan of one of my antagonists. Call down a small-scale apocalypse every month or two, most of the time on a new planet but occasionally hitting one that’s recovering. Doesn’t matter how many resources the Empire has; with each planet crippled their expenses increase, their income decreases, and it becomes harder for the citizenry to pretend that the sacrifices they make to be part of the Empire are worth it. Sooner or later (they’ve been doing this for 15 years, and estimate it’ll take about 100 more), the Empire will crumble, with far less loss of life than a traditional invasion or civil war.
Of course, this is a galactic empire we’re talking about, so the loss of life is still going to be at least in the millions, perhaps even billions if things go badly enough.
Morality math if freaking terrifying on a galactic scale.
I theorize two reasons for Plotvilles continued misfortunes and endurance in spite of all the horrors.
One is that they have an overly elaborate insurance scam in operation. Every disaster gets the paid more than they inevitably lose after the payout, and Quest Giver ensures a steady stream of adventurers and plot hooks to keep the scam going / legitimate.
The other is that Plotville is in fact a form of a Purgatory prison, and its inhabitants, the NPCs, are in fact serving a sort of penance of servitude by assisting the PCs in their quests against untold horrors.
Your problem is that you only see the bad things that happen to Plotsville. Not the divine intervention that saved their crops. Not the gift from the cleric of the god of wine. Nothing about the Temple of the Five Delights.
Back in my day we had Six Delights! Hmmmph!
Megacity 1 style. No matter what life goes on, scars are there but outside full societal collapse no reason to dwell on how people go on. I may have read too much Warhammer too…
For their 200th Adventure Path book, Paizo made a whole adventure about Pathfinder’s resident Plotsville of Sandpoint being even more on fire than usual. It’s called “Seven Dooms for Sandpoint.” Just the player’s guide PDF makes offhand references to goblins, giants, dragons, fires, tsunamis, disasters, ghouls, murderers “and more.” It actually gave me vibes of the small Maine town from the TV show Murder She Wrote, which suffered dozens and dozens of convoluted murders in just a few years without anyone acting like it was out of the ordinary.
For Pathfinder Second Edition, they published a world guide book that had helpful little timelines of each region and, because they considered all the previous Adventure Paths to be canon, the Varisia region had like three separate tsunamis with unrelated causes in less than a decade, each of which made sense in context but became really funny when listed in order.